U.S. COAL USE DOWN, THRIVING ELSEWHERE

Eastern Kentucky coal country is filled with people competing for nonexistent jobs, tied to the area by family and unable to sell their homes even if they want to leave.

People such as 50-year-old Frank Dixon, who was laid off from a coal mine right before Christmas. Dixon has worked in the coal industry since he was 21 years old, and he’s struggling to figure out how to make a living. “I’ve been looking for a job. But there are so many miners laid off in this area that wherever you go there’s already been 20 or 25 other people there looking for the same job, or for any job,” Dixon said.

While Dixon and thousands of others in the United States have lost their jobs, coal is booming in the rest of the world, and U.S. coal exports to Europe and China are rising.

The International Energy Agency’s latest report forecasts that coal will become the world’s dominant fuel, with global burning of the fossil fuel rising by 1.2 billion tons over the next four years. That’s the equivalent of adding the existing coal consumption of the U.S. and Russia combined. The agency’s executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, said coal made up a greater share of the global energy mix every year. “If no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade,” van der Hoeven said.

The IEA says America’s glut of cleaner, cheap natural gas — an unintentional side effect of the rapid rise of new drilling techniques — is pushing out the use of coal in the United States.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has opened up new reserves so vast that the U.S. will soon become a net natural gas exporter, slashing the country’s reliance on costly oil imports. And because natural gas is cleaner than coal, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have dropped to their lowest levels since 1992.

Now, U.S. coal is spreading around the world instead, pushing down global prices.

The IEA says the rest of the world should learn from the American experience of how to reduce coal use and lower the carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

In Europe, however, the spread of U.S. coal has raised fears among environmentalists that the cheap natural gas in the U.S. has simply led to higher overall fossil fuel consumption.

The agency expects that coal demand will grow in every region of the world — except the United States. There were an estimated 2,000 layoffs last year in the mountainous coal counties of Eastern Kentucky. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that coal production in that region will be half as much in 2018 as it was in 2010.

Some Eastern Kentucky counties already have unemployment rates of 13.5 to 17 percent and are bracing for an expected continued decline in coal jobs. The loss of tax revenue from coal production is creating million-dollar budget shortfalls for county governments struggling to pay their bills.

Coal-burning power plants are closing or switching to natural gas. Even the Big Sandy electric power plant, in the heart of Kentucky’s coal country, plans to shut its coal-burning boilers rather than retrofit the plant to meet environmental regulations. The Sierra Club counts 54 coal plants that closed or announced plans to close in 2012, and 11 more in just the first month of this year, reacting to the nation’s natural gas boom and tighter environmental regulations.